In the United States of Africa by Abdourahman A. Waberi

But you, Maya, where are you really from? What woods did you come out of? Stone by stone, you build your own edifice. You've raced through your life with your elbows close to your sides without ever looking back. The result of the race: if you admit everything you owe to others, it's because you're also well aware that you didn't engender yourself, and to a certain extent you are still determined by your place of birth, your family, your culture, and your origins, since a generic, self-engendered human being does not exist. At least not yet.

In Djiboutian writer Abdourahman A. Waberi's In the United States of Africa, 20th century history has been reversed: the "United States of Africa" are a prosperous conglomerate of wealthy and technologically sophisticated states, while Europe and America have plunged into civil war and famine. French, Swiss, German, Spanish, Italian refugees flock to the capital of Asmara to find work and food, where they form a despised and unfortunate underclass who live and die invisibly. Against this backdrop Waberi tells the story (in second person) of Maya, a sensitive young sculptor who discovers that she is half French, and who becomes increasingly socially aware of the plight of her European kinsmen, ultimately fleeing to troubled France to find her birth mother.

Part of me thinks: what's the point of this? There is, or could be, a kind of facileness in simply reversing the polarity of society in this way. At best, it reveals the way our language fails at universalism and becomes absurd when its applications become reversed, talking about, for instance, the "warlords" of France. At its worst, it becomes a kind of easy joke, a "what if" repeated a couple hundred times. But I think that's all redeemed by Waberi's writing, which is clever and erudite, full of cultural knowledge and allusion that gets pulled apart and remixed in ways that keep the worldbuilding fresh and curious. (Interesting to see how, for instance, Black Americans like Langston Hughes and Martin Luther King, Jr. remain part of the historical scene--don't get too tripped up on the "well, what if" of that--and become celebrated figures after whom schools and airports are named.) 

The second person narration keeps us at a distance from Maya that keeps the focus on the topsy-turvy world, I think. She never quite emerges as a real character in a way that might elevate the imaginative qualities of the book even further. And yet there are scenes of real pathos, as with Maya's disillusionment upon discovering her destitute French mother, who has little to provide her, a victim, like so many, of world circumstances, and Maya's flight back to the safety of Africa. Change the victims, let the exploiters become the exploited, and still the shape of the world feels tragically familiar.

With the addition of Djibouti, my "Countries Read" list is up to 117!